Business, Financial & Legal Posts - Page 76

Wind turbines are being used around the world in different sizes to generate electricity used to power homes and business. A new smaller scale wind turbine project has hit Kickstarter that is called the Trinity.

Trinity is a small 12-inch cylinder when folded down to make it portable. It is designed to generate power that can be used to charge up any USB gadget that you might have. Trinity is able to produce 15W of power and has its own internal 15000-mAh battery.

The shuttered Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange has asked a Japanese court to grant liquidation of the company's assets, and will no longer seek bankruptcy protection. Following the catastrophic loss of bitcoin currency, the site quickly shuttered - with customers essentially left out in the cold.

The company doesn't seemingly have a realistic approach to rehabilitating the company - and Mt. Gox creditors and investors spread across the world - it would simply be too difficult to arrange necessary meetings. There was initially hope an outside investor would buy the exchange, promising creditors a cut of future profits, but they will now settle for a slice of the liquidation.

The Galaxy S5 is here, with millions already enjoying their new flagship smartphone from Samsung, but just how many Galaxy S5 handsets does Samsung expect to ship in the next couple of months? 35 million - that's how many.

According to The Korea Times, Samsung shipped 1.3 times as many Galaxy S5 smartphones in the first 24 hours of sales than the South Korean giant did with the S4 launch. Both investors and analysts are impressed with how well the S5 is selling, removing the fears they once had about market saturation or a shift away from Samsung.

One Senior Fund Manager spoke with The Korea Times, saying: "Against earlier expectations, the S5 was well-received by consumers in the global market. We don't have any plans to advise our big clients to unload their Samsung stock". According to insiders at Samsung, the company is hoping to ship over 35 million Galaxy S5 units by the end of Q2 2014.

For weeks now it has appeared that Facebook would be swooping in and buying up drone manufacturer, Titan Aerospace, but today Google has apparently beaten Facebook to the punch and picked up the company itself. While no price has been mentioned on how much the deal cost Google, it does mark the third company of this type that the Mountain View-based company has added to its stables.

"Titan Aerospace and Google share a profound optimism about the potential for technology to improve the world. It's still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation," said a Google spokesperson.

Samsung has reportedly moved around 1.3 times as many Galaxy S5's on April 11 than it did with its Galaxy S4 last year. Some European countries are seeing over 100% more demand for the Galaxy S5 versus the S4 from last year. In the UK, there were some massive lines outside of the new Samsung Experience Stories, where launch day sales were double that of the S4.

There has been talk of the premium handset market being saturated, but it looks like Samsung has proven them wrong yet again with the launch of the Galaxy S5.

If your boss walked up to you today and offered you $5000 to quit your job and never look back, would you take the offer, or would you realize that $5000 is just a drop in the bucket over the long-term? Many Amazon employees are experiencing that exact scenario right now. Amazon says that it is offering its warehouse workers $2000 to quit their jobs, and increases the price by $1000 every year to those who refuse until the amount reaches $5000.

Amazon says that it makes this offer to employees as an effort to see who really wants to work for Amazon, and to weed out those who are just there for the job. The idea is not new though, and was pioneered by Zappos who made similar offers to its employees. In his earnings call to investors Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, elaborated on the idea behind offering employees rewards for quitting their jobs.

"The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it's for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is "Please Don't Take This Offer," Bezos said "We hope they don't take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company."

If you own a Sony VAIO Fit 11A notebook computer, you need to be aware that a battery issues has been identified. This issue, like most battery problems on notebook computers, can result in a fire. The big problem for users of these Sony notebooks is that the battery inside the machines isn't removable.

That means you will have to return the entire notebook for repairs. Sony wants people to stop using the machines, unplug them, and return them to be repaired or replaced. There are 25,905 machines affected by this issue globally.

Amazon has just announced it is acquiring comiXology, a digital comics platform. There's no details available on what Amazon shelled out for the company, but comiXology was one of the best places to source comics from, so it makes sense for Amazon to bolster its comic business.

ComiXology said: "ComiXology's mission is to spread the love of comics and graphic novels in all forms. There is no better home for comiXology than Amazon to see this vision through. Working together, we look to accelerate a new age for comic books and graphic novel". Amazon's Vice President of Content Acquisition and Independent Publishing, David Naggar, said: "Amazon and comiXology share a passion for reinventing reading in a digital world. We've long admired the passion comiXology brings to changing the way we buy and read comics and graphic novels. We look forward to investing in the business, growing the team, and together, bringing comics and graphic novels to even more readers".

No one knows what is going to happen in the immediate future, but we should see Amazon make a move in the comic space this year thanks to the acquisition of comiXology.

You can walk outside, look up at the sky, and see propeller aircraft flying around on any given day. The thing all those propeller aircraft have in common is that they need some sort of fuel to burn in their engines. Some gliders can fly without a motor, but most aircraft still burn fuel of some sort.

An electric airplane called the Solar Impulse 2 is getting ready for a voyage that will see it travel around the globe using no fuel. It looks a lot like a glider with long and thin wings and it does have propellers. Rather than spinning them with fossil fuels this plane uses solar power.

Inside the fuselage are some sort of battery packs that store the energy from the solar panels on the tops of the wing surface. Those batteries store enough power that the airplane can fly at night. It will hold two pilots who will fly the aircraft around the world.

There was once a time when the iPad was invincible, selling millions upon millions of tablets for Apple, making the Cupertino-based company the leader in tablets. But, with Samsung shipping over 14 million tablets in Q1 2014 alone, Samsung is quickly ccatching up.

One Samsung official spoke with ZDNet, who said: "We have implemented a comprehensive sales plan for tablets, from emerging countries to developed ones. We have overcome last year's weak fourth quarter (for the first quarter this year)". Samsung's mobile boss has promised that the South Korean giant will be the leader in tablets before 2014 is wrapped up.

As it stands, Apple controls 30% of the global tablet shipments for the previous quarter, according to an internal Samsung estimation. In the previous quarter, Apple sold a record 26 million iPads. In 2013, Samsung shipped over 40 million tablets, double what it shipped the previous year. For 2014, Samsung has some big hopes, where it wants to ship as many as 100 million slates.